Identity through death: from genealogy to building one’s essence

The aim of the research is to determine, based on contemporary philosophical anthropology, the role that death plays in the construction of identity. The article reveals that philosophical anthropology allows us, in a person’s desire to identify themselves through the question “Who am I?”, to see not only a look to the future, an active construction by a person of their essence, ultimately inaccessible to them during their lifetime, but also a look to the past, allowing them, when answering the question, to refer to real or imagined information and ideas about parents and more distant ancestors. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that, through the prism of contemporary philosophical anthropology, the construction of identity is considered not only as an active process of an individual creating themselves, but also as a process directed towards something that lies beyond human knowledge, that is, as a striving for the transcendent. As a result, it was shown that when attempting to create their identity, a person, directing attention to their past and future, encounters not only the transcendence of the Self, already known to phenomenologists, but also the transcendence of death, pointing to the limits of human cognitive abilities.